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Art Music and Film From the WestThu, 17 May 2018 21:53:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.15The Fence Spotlights NM Photographers in a Five-City Tourhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/auOENuX9KLk/
http://adobeairstream.com/design/photo-fence/#respondWed, 27 Jul 2016 18:28:34 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26882More ...]]>Organized for Santa Fe’s Railyard Park by the New Mexico chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), and by ASMP New Mexico‘s president Gabriella Marks, The Fence is an annual outdoor, juried photography exhibition. The Fence 2016 occupies a 600-foot span of a constructed wall in Santa Fe Railyard Park. It is part of a national tour that is also seeing stops in Brooklyn, Boston, Atlanta and Houston. Gabriella Marks writes:

THE FENCE features the work of 56 photographers from New Mexico and around the world. The goal is to present exceptional work that is innovative and accessible to all people. More than 3 million people are expected to see the national exhibition at one or more of the five locations throughout the summer and fall of 2016.

Santa Fe is the western-most exhibit location for THE FENCE, and the smallest city – yet our tremendous legacy of photography and the award-winning venue of the Railyard Art Park makes it an ideal destination.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/design/photo-fence/feed/0http://adobeairstream.com/design/photo-fence/Juvenile Life without Parole, Captured in Natural Lifehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/hE8726usDVo/
http://adobeairstream.com/film/juvenile-life-without-parole-captured-in-natural-life/#respondFri, 22 Jul 2016 01:54:27 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26950More ...]]>Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP) will one day hopefully be as obsolete as pillories, bilboes, brands and branks. Until then, the United States remains the only country in the world that allows children, some as young as 13, to be incarcerated until death without hope of parole. Stepping into this ongoing calamity is Natural Life, Tirtza Even’s 2014 experimental video documentary that aired at the 2016 Currents New Media Festival. The documentary aims to hasten the day when juvenile life without parole will be universally banned.

Natural Life is Even’s third video project on youth incarceration. When she launched her Kickstarter campaign to finance post-production of Natural Life, she wrote that “41 states in the U.S. elect to enforce a sentence of life without parole on youth under the age of 18.” Now, 17 states have banned JLWOP, and five states ban life without parole for children in most cases. Even’s film focuses on Michigan, the state that has approximately 368 JLWOP prisoners, a number exceeded only by Pennsylvania, according to a January 2016 article in Mother Jones.

Even’s feature-length video depicts the lives of five juvenile prisoners, and affords them opportunity to tell something of their dehumanizing experiences as they age through the prison system. In one prisoner’s words, she entered prison “wearing a training bra” and is now “menopausal.” Another yearns for a son “to protect and love. And to love me.” But JLWOP mutes their biological clocks, reducing their urges to motherhood to a dream not only deferred, but denied.

Natural Life tells the worst possible story about the U.S. justice system and American justice in a way that is not only affecting but generative. Even’s main visual editing device is the split screen in which juxtapositions are used cinematically. Yet Natural Life’s aesthetic strategies resist the commonplace presentation of talking heads taking turns with their narration as if on a witness stand. Instead of just a cavalcade of lawyers, police officers, bureaucrats, prisoners’ family members, and victims’ families, the pairings offer context, contrast, relief, respite, reinforcement. They underscore the humanity of the film’s subjects as people who are confined all the time.

The documentary’s panoply of imagery transmits through the watcher’s senses. Images of leaves as ubiquitous nature transact with fences and gates as ubiquitous prison-life anomalies. Through repetition, the slot where food is passed to prisoners in solitary confinement is not just an aperture into a view of a cage, but a portal to compassion for the prisoner loneliness and deprivation the gesture underlines.

At the start of the film an animal tethered to a rope appears next to a view of a groomed horse loping into a barn. The rider who dismounts expertly is the twin sister of a brother who was murdered. An unlocked door swings open and shut in wind. The victim’s sister tells of the poverty and dysfunction with which her young life was saddled, before her twin’s murder made her burden even heavier.

Even considers scale and proportion in her storytelling that also advances her protest against this horrendous form of imprisonment for juvenile offenders that manifested in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s with the rise of the myth of the “super-predator” advanced by some criminologists, and described by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in his book Just Mercy. From page 159:

Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “who have absolutely no respect for human life.” Panic from the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless children” led almost every state to enact legislation that increased the exposure of children to adult prosecution.

No cohort of “super-predators” ever manifested, and the myth has been thoroughly debunked.

But the “exposure” came in the form of state laws that weakened the threshold for transfer from juvenile court to adult court, the unintended consequences of which were addressed by US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in Graham v. Florida in 2010, a case that decided JLWOP could not be imposed for non-homicide offenses.

…the fact that transfer and direct charging laws make life without parole possible for some juvenile nonhomicide offenders does not justify a judgment that many States intended to subject such offenders to life without parole sentences. –GRAHAM v. FLORIDA Opinion of the Court, p.16

In Natural Life, three of the five prisoners whose stories Even reveals were stooges of adults they hoped to please or placate. One boy gave his mother keys to his father’s apartment; the boy’s mother used the keys to enter and kill the boy’s father. On what scale can a sentence of the child to JLWOP be weighed as just?

Even is a skilled colorist of mood and themes. There is a moment where a lawyer weeps for his client whom the Michigan Department of Corrections has provided with no rehabilitation services, even as she has been repeatedly sexually assaulted and abused in prison. His shirt and tie are the same hue of blue as the unoccupied plastic bucket seats in the split screen; there’s a sense that these seats are not just empty, but abandoned.

Even chooses interesting, unexpected framing devices. She’ll shoot scenes through a tire swing or a grate. A multiplicity of perspectives both in and outside of prison are constant undercurrents of her visual scene-making. An ingenious original score by Oded Zehavi seems often to be asking: How long must we wait for a righting of such profound systemic injustice? As the credits rolled, the electronic chords sounded like eerie cries from outer space—austere and alienating.

Artistically, Even was handed a set of constraints that fostered the creativity of the telling. The Michigan Department of Corrections would not allow on-camera interviews with the prisoners, only their voices could be recorded as they spoke to her on the telephone.

Even located an abandoned prison in Jackson, MI, and used that interior as a film set for staged illustrations by young people acting out various tableaux of imprisonment—pacing, sleeping, tracing their fingers over walls, playing solitaire. They seem to be holding a place in our imaginations for the actual prisoners whose faces cannot even be recorded under the prison system’s strictures and censures.

While one actual prisoner describes in voice an opportunistic gang rape of a juvenile during an electrical outage when the prison was suddenly plunged into darkness, the half-screen is visually completely blacked out. His words read as white subtitles scrolling across the bottom of the frame. The actor in the split screen is bouncing his foot in an agitated way.

There’s no reenactment of the violation being narrated by voice. The agitated and anxiety-provoking movement conjures the violence of the assault.

As a viewing experience, letting the surfaces, colors and actions wash over one’s consciousness becomes an enjoyable mental exercise, or game, that counterbalances the relentless heaviness of the topic. I left the theater curiously energized by the film’s artistic excellence. Even’s documentary has expressed her deepest hope of her director’s statement:

“My hope is to depict change as inevitable, and difference as structural. And in that way, challenge the underlying presumption of permanence and sameness that the sentence of life-without-parole for juveniles claims and imposes.”

Her hopeful challenge may be catching on.

“In the last four years the number of states banning JLWOP has more than tripled,” said Jody Kent Lavy, Executive Director of Fair Sentencing for Youth. “We’ve seen broad bi-partisan support of these reforms to ban the use of it as a penalty for children under 18 years-old. Whether coming at it from the right from the perspective of the need for redemption and second chances, or from the perspective of racial justice and human rights on the left, we agree that we have gone too far, that it’s too extreme, and that there’s really a need to revisit this approach and scale back these extreme sentences.”

Even’s current project continues her thematic preoccupation with issues of mass incarceration and long-term injustice.

It was a curious other factor of the post-viewing experience that I started thinking of actions I might take to help bring greater awareness to Natural Life and to the plight of the estimated 2,500 prisoners in the US subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of JLWOP. I reached out to Efrén Paredes Jr. through a Facebook page dedicated to clemency for him.

Paredes Jr. is one of the five prisoners featured in Natural Life, and was also recently named in Latina Magazine as one of four Latinos deserving clemency right now. Please visit this link for my interview with him.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/film/juvenile-life-without-parole-captured-in-natural-life/feed/0http://adobeairstream.com/film/juvenile-life-without-parole-captured-in-natural-life/Abstract Expressionist Women at DAM in Reviewhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/btMr9V3MvDQ/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/abstract-expressionist-women-at-denver-art-museum/#commentsTue, 19 Jul 2016 17:37:46 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26895More ...]]>The 2001 edition of The 20th-Century Art Book defines Abstract Expressionism as a post-World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. Ab Ex came to describe a specific group of primarily male artists committed to an expressive and profoundly emotional art that arched to individual ideals of universalism. So where have the Abstract Expressionist women been?

Jackson Pollock is usually credited with revolutionizing art because of his process. He put raw, unstretched canvas on the floor and dripped, threw, stained and brushed paint onto and beyond the edge of the canvas. He may have adopted the technique from Ukrainian-American artist Janet Sobel, who made her first drip painting in 1944. Pollock saw her work with critic Clement Greenberg in 1946 at Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century Gallery and the next year Pollock began flinging and pouring paint. The style caused him to become the face of American painting when in 1949, Life magazine posed the question: “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

Pollock met his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, in 1942 after they both exhibited at the McMillen Gallery in New York. Krasner famously said: “When I first saw his paintings, I nearly died.” The Abstract Expressionist woman artist went on to champion his genius, some say to the detriment of her own career.

“I’m always going to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock—that’s a matter of fact—[but] I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock,” Krasner said.

This quote greets visitors to Denver Art Museum’s exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism, along with another by artist Ethel Schwabacher: “Was the result of this Greek teaching [the classic play of Sophocles, Antigone] that women should be willing to give their lives in favor of men, in that men were deemed by society as so much more important?”

The paintings include large, textured, stained, all-over canvas creations like Schwabacher’s Antigone I, from 1958, a 51 x 82 ¼ inch canvas of blood red, ochre, black, blue, gray and white markings that is a figurative abstraction of the Greek myth. And Krasner’s The Seasons from 1957, a 92 ¾ x 203 7/8 inch work on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art created after Pollock’s death. Krasner said she painted it with tears streaming down her face. The painting is Matisse-esque with dark marks and lines, highlighted by red, pink and green stained-and-painted sections suggesting seedpods and ripe fruit.

Denver Art Museum purchased Elaine de Kooning’s Bullfight from 1959, a 77 5/8 x 131 ¼ inch canvas, in 2012. Its vivid yellows, reds and greens are jagged and alive, only its title hinting at the event of the bullfight.

Women artists have been historically dismissed as not creating work of the same caliber as the men who were their husbands or teachers. There is Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, wife of Willem de Kooning. Grace Hartigan, close friend of Willem de Kooning, who in the ’50s changed her name to George in the spirit of George Eliot or George Sand.

When asked if a male artist ever told her she painted like a man, Grace Hartigan replied, “Not twice.”

There are also these women: Ethel Schwabacher, student and close friend of Arshile Gorky. Sonia Gechtoff, wife of painter James Kelly. Deborah Remington who studied with Clyfford Still. And Zoe Longfield, one of the few Ab Ex women Still admitted into his inner circle.

Helen Frankenthaler, who studied with Hans Hoffman, might be the exception to the overlooked Women of Abstract Expressionism rule as her paintings have often been included in scholarship and exhibitions.

Krasner, who studied cubism at Cooper Union and then painted murals for the WPA, also studied with Hans Hoffman. She engaged in the intellectual debates about painting with Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But in spite of her arguing that painting should be large and should expand beyond the boundaries of the frame, she is considered a lesser painter of the 1940s when she produced her Little Image series—small, exquisite works.

Katy Siegel, in a talk at the Whitney Museum on September 4, 2015, said that when one visits the Pollock/Krasner house in Springs, New York and sees where Krasner worked at a small table in a bedroom, one understands that a lack of space prescribed her working in small size while Pollock was living. It wasn’t until after Pollock died (1956) that Krasner took over his larger studio in the barn and created enormous works like The Seasons. When the new Whitney opened last year, Siegal called The Seasons the strongest painting in the seventh-floor gallery.

The art critic Irving Sandler, in a 2013 interview with art critic Joan Marter, said: “I really hate to say this, but there didn’t seem to be women of the stature of, say, Mark Rothko, Bill de Kooning, Jackson Pollock. They just weren’t there.”

When Marter pushed back with the names of women painters, Sandler reiterated that he didn’t think they were of the same stature as the men of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists working before 1950. Of the second generation, Sandler allowed: “The important thing to remember is that Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell were the really strong painters. They were the strongest painters at the time.”

(The issue of second-generation Ab Ex women, whose best work is critically considered to have occurred after 1950, is one that many women artists felt was dismissive of the actual timing of their development and work.)

The Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition features Frankenthaler’s breakthrough stain painting Mountain Storm, Jacob’s Ladder on loan from The Museum of Modern Art and Western Dream, one of my favorites. Hartigan’s large, colorful painting from 1950, The King is Dead, about Picasso, hangs with other of her lush works. Nearby are six of Mitchell’s frenetic works created between 1952-1956.

I interviewed Curator Gwen Chanzit on June 21, 2016, at the Denver Art Museum where she said: “The most surprising thing to me was that nobody had done this show before.”

Chanzit said she did not set out to do a woman’s show, but that she kept thinking of the possibilities of exhibiting the Women of Abstract Expressionism after viewing Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976 at the Jewish Museum in 2008.

“On the plane ride home I kept wracking my brain. It was amazing to me that an exhibition on the topic hadn’t been organized. And it is surprising that more of these women painters still are not known.”

She began working in earnest five years ago.

The result is an exhibition divided into twelve individual spaces for each of the 12 women with a biographical wall text featuring a quote, a brief bio and images of the artists from the period. A kitschy educational lounge is decked out in 1950s-style furniture with more photos of the artists and their male counterparts at exhibits and gatherings, and a playlist of music (mostly jazz) from the time period (available on Spotify).

Not only gender inequity, but also geographical myopia identified this period, according to Chanzit’s exhibition. Abstract expressionism was centered in New York City, but one could say the West deeply influenced the group.

At the height of his career, Pollock painted in a barn in Springs, New York, but he was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912 and grew up in Arizona and Chico, California, experiencing Native American cultural symbols, which may have influenced his work as glyphs and motifs, what Jung called archetypes, emerged during his Jungian analysis. Clyfford Still was born in North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Alberta, Canada. Mark Rothko, whose family emigrated from Dvisnk, Russia, grew up in Portland, Oregon and his first one-person museum exhibition was at the Museum of Art in Portland. Adolph Gottlieb and his wife Esther Dick moved to Arizona in 1937 where they lived for a year.

Chanzit makes it a point to let us know that the women artists from San Francisco were not subjected to the same gender discrimination their female peers in New York received.

“I never felt any kind of resentment toward me because I was a woman…I had none of the hang-ups to deal with that the women in New York had to deal with,” artist Sonia Gechtoff said. Gechtoff, who worked in San Francisco, was included in the 1954 exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Younger American Painters as well as the in the United States Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, the same year she moved to New York where she described the atmosphere as discouraging, unsupportive and misogynistic.

“When my mother was painting abstract expressionist works, it was particularly difficult for the women because they were not recognized by the men as being proper vehicles or embodiment of the movement because they thought that they [the men] were the embodiments of that movement and that the women were collateral,” Christopher Schwabach said, in a short film that accompanies the exhibition.

The women as “collateral” produced works often more experimental than the mens’, tied into figuration inspired by dance, as well as ideas and themes from philosophy and poetry. The women were often free to explore and try new things. They didn’t have to adhere to being in New York as the new seat of power in art.

However, the divide between the collaborative and relatively more open atmosphere of the West Coast artists and the New York School is clearly on display in this exhibition and its related materials. In her catalog essay titled The Advantages of Obscurity Women Abstract Expressionists in San Francisco, Susan Landauer points out that after 1950, when Clyfford Still left San Francisco for New York, “[The California School of Fine Arts] entered an era of unparalleled opportunity, in which women were not just participants, but became leaders of artistic activity.” Landauer suggests that remaining in San Francisco and working in obscurity was a benefit to these artists who developed their own, often whimsical approach to abstraction.

Yet, Irving Sandler also dismisses West Coast artists in his interview with Joan Marter.

“Remington and Gechtoff are very interesting artists. But they had their own group,” Sandler said.

“Isn’t it fair to say that after Still leaves the area, that these artists on the West Coast are part of a broader view of Abstract Expressionism?” Marter asks.

“Absolutely. But they are sort of separate from us in New York.”

It remains a twisted fact of art history that Sandler dismissed the women painters for not being in New York and not working big enough, though they worked large often earlier than the men. And for not being inventive enough, though Janet Sobel was arguably the first to drip paint.

The 12 women, selected by Chanzit, stand in at the very least for the other 28 included in the catalog, and the 100 the curator considered. Yet this exhibit seems more like a rhetorical gesture than a distinct step toward reframing art history.

Chanzit said. “The women didn’t come late, as some would say. And the women didn’t only paint small. I think it’s just time to do a reassessment of their role. Of course there are others who haven’t been recognized. I hope this is an exhibition that will spur more exhibitions and more attention to who may have been left out of mainstream histories of abstract expressionism.”

The real beneficiary of Chanzit’s exhibition is the Denver Art Museum. Because of the exhibition, the museum has eight new acquisitions and three promised gifts. On the second floor is a smaller display of Abstract Expressionism from the Denver Art Museum featuring works by Betty Parson, Janice Biala, Robert Motherwell, Theodore Stamos, Lee Krasner, Deborah Remington, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Philip Guston, and Dune, the museum’s 1970 Joan Mitchell along with a smaller one of Mitchell’s works on paper.

Brenda Webster, Ethel Schwabacher’s daughter, herself a critic and author, makes a poignant statement that so many women can understand: “My mother, though she was struggling for recognition did not want to be recognized as a woman. She hated it when people referred to her as a woman painter. She wanted to be a painter. Period.”

For this very reason, Lee Krasner chose not to sign her paintings or to use only her initials or hide the signature, to not be singled out as female. Other artist changed their names: Grace Hartigan became George Hartigan and Gertrude Green went by Peter, Jay De Feo thought her name was helpful in winning the opportunity to go abroad early in her career. Lena Krassner changed her name to the gender neutral Lee Krasner.

Hans Hoffman famously said to Lee Krasner of her painting: “This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman.”

If only exhibitions did not have to use gender nomenclature and full equity had been achieved in art.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/art/abstract-expressionist-women-at-denver-art-museum/feed/2http://adobeairstream.com/art/abstract-expressionist-women-at-denver-art-museum/Currents New Media Festival in Reviewhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/NB8JxWjlEtQ/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/currents-new-media-festival-in-review/#respondTue, 19 Jul 2016 17:37:21 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26892More ...]]>Currents New Media Festival this year augmented what new media artist Julia Scher has called “appearances in screens” with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences. Nested into the main event at El Museo Cultural was Code and Noise, an independent exhibition that seemed especially well-suited for visitors interested in how appearances in screens may metamorphose into a next situation.

I paid three visits to Currents 2016 and consistently found Code and Noise, curated by Christine Duval and sponsored by the Thoma Foundation, to be of interest. So much so, in fact, that it led me later on (at my office/studio) to watch a panel discussion on Julia Scher’s Predictive Engineering, in its third iteration (since 1993) at the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The Predictive Engineering panel, held at the Tate Media in Transition conference in London last November, featured Scher and SFMOMA curators. They discussed how SFMOMA has committed to Scher’s time-based media, a changing media contemplation on the relationship of bodies and buildings, over 20 years. The obligations on the institution coincide with the artist finely re-tuning, over iterations or exponents of Predictive Engineering, precisely how the work deals in real-time and past-time relationships including its own archive of previous appearances.

The Tate panel constellated questions that apply to new media in general: What does it mean for new media to “preserve” time? What does it mean to iterate?

Judging by Currents festival, it appears to mean more and more the license of the user to determine the parameters of the experience based in a confluence of screens and viewing possibilities.

Standing at the edge of Reilly Donovan’s Brain Xels, an augmented reality work, I was approached by a young festival volunteer with iPad whose handoff of the device let me see holographic portraits of people emerge on the pixelated carpet — a space that I could both see and stand on without aid of iPad. What I’m calling a carpet is described in artist materials as a “protective laminate vinyl adhesive sticker that is adhered to a floor for viewers to safely walk upon.”

It is, unsurprisingly, an information-ful surface as well.

Asking me to sit down on a chair and don headphones was Disposa, a 2012 video work made by Mitchell Gustin at San Clemente.A horizontal image appears in a black rectangular expanse. Seven people, nude from the waist up, stand next to one another, their backs to the camera. They begin swaying ever so slightly. The shadows between their armpits and their wrists lead you to start free-associating their body parts. Arms like elephant trunks, outlines of breasts inclining toward the neighbor.

Finally, maybe six or seven minutes in, each of seven torsos turns individually around to face the camera. The four men and three women stoop down, one by one, to select something off of the ground. The brief exposure of their faces and bodies is like a memory of humanity. Their hands hold up the object they’ve selected: a chain, a one-dollar bill, a photograph. They let go of their objects, shake their hands out, and turn their backs again.

Entering into Code and Noise, squint tapestry, a wall textile by Laura Splan undulates with a pattern suggestive of lines made by Rapidograph. The computerized woven jacquard is actually formed of electromyography data captured as the artist squints or blinks. The signal turns the work into something both cardiac and orchestral. I also especially loved what JD Beltran is doing with unfixing the “appearance in screens” aspect of new media, by making the screen a mutable space. Frame abuts edge abuts motion and empowers a real-time dual perception of time frozen and time advancing.

In the several small screens devoted to animation loops, I enjoyed Viktoria Karmins Extraterrestre (Mexico 2015), a Boschian underworld of proliferating plants and morphing rodents and insects. The visual interest lies also in her sense of image-making as invention meeting historical document.

Karmin’s work made me flash on a talk I caught at Santa Fe Art Institute, called Creation Myths of Mesoamerica: Popol Vuh and Quetzalcoatl. Pre-Columbian scholar and art historian Khristaan Villela interviewed illustratator Luis Garay of Granada, Nicaragua, on Garay’s eight childrens’ books including one on immigration, The Long Road. The fascinating discussion dealt with transactions in time. Villela shared his observations about the ways that contemporary time is constantly reconstructing ideas and inventions about the appearances of the past.

The New Millennium Workout Routine takes its title from a mandatory series of exercises the South Korean government prescribed the people in 1999 to ensure the nation’s future physical health. Artist Yaloopop videotaped herself performing the exercises in red long underwear. The work becomes both a nationalistic ritual and a meditation on a faceless condition. Yaloopop’s black hair and red costume proliferate.

The show included also many leading New Mexico artists of video, including Debris of Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton, and Orlando Leibovitz’s Vignettes, that asked a visitor to peer close for the intimacy of nudes walking into and out of the frame. A man coming in and out, walking a dog. Another nude juggling black balls. Still a third, a famous video artist himself, facing the camera holding a camera. Adn a woman who appears her back to us, wearing a garment she sheds to reveal both breasts gone.

Currents 2016 had an emotional feeling to itself this year, a sense in which both pre-stored recordings of visitorheartbeats and South Korean calisthenics could coexist with a visitor’s need to be as peripatetic and restless as new media are.

We talked about his work Dystopia Files that began in 1999 when Tribe first shot video showing interactions between police and protesters on U.S. streets.

Tribe personally shot some of what came to compose the Dystopia Files archive at the Battle in Seattle protests (World Trade organization, 1999). He observed to me during our interview the ways that the Battle changed how protest was policed.

In 2003, the “Miami model”arose to describe the Miami authorities’ desire not to be surprised by protesters at a subsequent trade talks’ protest held in that city. The Miami model launched a category of weaponry called “less than lethal weapons.”These included paintball canisters filled with tear gas, and eventually, LRADs, long-range acoustic devices like sound cannons.

TheMiami model legally employed pre-emptive arrests, which became a tactic widely used and copied by police during the Occupy movement to remove protesters from streets that were, actually, geographically far from scenes of protest action, and specifically (as concerned Occupy) from Zanotti Park in Manhattan.

Mark Tribe as an artist and a political actor came to an observation that protest is performative. As Brazilian theorists like Paulo Freire and theatre director Augusto Boal had understood, performative actions― touching on formalisms of art even as they transected social change―do not have to take place on a theater stage. Such was the premise oflive-action theaters like Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

Boal in 2005 described what happened in 1960s Brazil. Members of the public spontaneously took on performative roles in street drama. “The actor became the spectator of the spectator who had become an actor, so the fiction and reality were overlapping, no?,” he told Juan Gonzales on Democracy Now in 2005.

With the recent confluence of reprehensible events ricocheting from the killings of civilians by police to killings of police by civilians, comes a new widespread recognition of what power has been imparted by the small screen of smartphone cameras. For individuals, that small screen is an agent metaphorically as potent as new weaponry that is also changing the dialogue about lines between policing and warfare.

Writer Mary Curtis has decried the “compartmentalization of mourning.”

It is rare that there has felt so open an opportunity to discuss what role exactly the arts might contribute to discourse about images and politics in a time so fractured and fear-mongering as now. Video, to crib from Julia Scher speaking at the Tate Media in Transition conference, has addicted Americans to relentless and abject “appearances in screens.”

I had revisited my 2011 podcast interview with Tribe partly to remind myself about a new media artist whose work entailed back in 1999 and forward, a formal modeling of new media communications structures’ larger participatory roles in society. Tribe’s interests in public space extended later on to staging live re-enactments of historical speeches in public parks.

Tribe who also 20 years ago founded the open-source arts website, Rhizome, observed about 20 minutes into our conversation, “New media is a strange term, isn’t it.”I had been probing specifically how Tribe perceived the work of his camera at the protests he attended. Was it a camera among cameras? Or was it a camera on the cameras like a two-way mirror in which the recorder at least presumptively parodied the (absent) conscience of mass media?

Today these questions seem almost quaint. Yet the requirement to begin to parse new appearances in screens,is urgent. Reflection is the factor that must not be lost in the race to be a commenter on the fast roll of events as seen and shared on small screens.

I was visiting last week in Colorado with two of my closest New York women friends.On our first morning together I was using them as a sounding board for a discussion of lines between documentary and art, and new uses of social media.We began discussing the Minnesota and Baton Rouge police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.By dinner that night came reports of the Dallas sniper who killed five Dallas police officers. Our phones pinged with news updates. (And, subsequent to writing of article, the appalling murder of two police officers in Baton Rouge.) We could hardly believe our ears.

Adepts and boomboxes both share space in digital or new media democracy. Diamond Reynolds’ superlative composure notches a singular place for herself. Riffing off a PR term, Diamond Reynolds became a “super-influencer” because of a calamity, a human tragedy. Whether she was documenting out of instinct or as coping skill is unanswerable.Diamond Reynolds told the BBC the other day:“I never thought things that I saw happen on TV were going to happen in my life.”

“We[Philando Castile and she] were planning marriage. We were going to get a dog. We were going to have kids. We were going to move. I was going to get a better job. We were going to get up and get over, you know, the slums. Now I don’t know how I’m going to do those things without him.”

One of my friends had said in the morning, and I had written it down,“All this police stuff.Now, it’s become a body of work.” The ethics are far from being sortedout.

As we head into the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, the role of national grief and the twisting of nationalist rhetoric, makes essential talk about intersections of racism and institutional authority an immense responsibility. It’s a responsibility not made any easier by the many ways that images can be spun into mirrors of a darkening language even seen through a lens meant to make public behavior transparent.

Even writing this far into this essay has imparted a slight tension headache. It’s as if critical interrogation of what we’re seeing as we’re seeing it comes too much to psychically handle.

New media proposes caveats upon caveat and dependent clauses that can’t stand alone upon other rickety parts of image-making speech

My ability to see information all day on my phone or laptop and sitting down at night to watch TV, in front of a 48-inch screen, has gradations of cultural penetration that many if not most Americans today share. It’s your screen but it’s our society, and the “it” of media appearances―chirrup you have a text, brring an appointment―is oddly and eternally disembodied, until what is being shown is a body or bodies in the process of being rendered lifeless.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/art/dystopia-files-revisited/feed/0http://adobeairstream.com/art/dystopia-files-revisited/SFMOMA Cruise Ship Makes Port With Trophies Aboardhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/jRQxWwSmIp0/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/sfmoma-cruise-ship-makes-port-trophies-aboard/#commentsTue, 10 May 2016 18:25:12 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26697More ...]]>Rich donors are to shiny new art museums what electricity is to Teslas. In San Francisco, companies like the Gap (founded 1969) and Apple Computer (1976) seized the new American economy and mindset well before the first dot-com boom. Doris and Donald Fisher, who founded the Gap and began collecting art to hang in their offices in the late 1970s, have top donor billing at SFMOMA’s reopening, with 260 collection works on view (in a 100-year loan arrangement); their son Robert is president of the SFMOMA board. Following in second place are Charles and Helen Schwab, who endow director Neal Benezra’s job. (Charles Schwab’s San Francisco launch dates to 1971.)

Today in San Francisco, protests against gentrification by working artists cross media. I watched network news reports about violations by the chuffing tech buses that pick up tech workers in Soma to take them to the Silicon Valley campuses. Narratives of the data visualization and analysis collective Anti-Eviction Mapping Project are housed on a website that storytells histories of no-fault evictions in San Francisco 1997-2015. (The project was part of a group show last May, The Dissidents, The Displaced and the Outliers at Random Parts in Oakland.) Meanwhile in New York, a recent show at Printed Matter and a book, A History of Colab (and Related Activities), trace the history of the artist-run group that occupied 123 Delancey Street in the New Year’s Day 1980 “Real Estate Show.” Being locked out from the one-day squat resulted in a New York City agency giving the Colab artists control of 156 Rivington, which became ABC No Rio.

If this seems irrelevant to the opening of a new art museum in San Francisco, it is not.

The super-size clout the donors evidently had in the programming comes at a huge cost of diversity. Not only gender and racial diversity, but diversity revealing northern California’s own modern art history. Where was work by Jay De Feo? Survival Research Laboratory? The Capp Street Project? Guerrilla poster artist extraordinaire, Robbie Conal? Representation of the decimations of the AIDS crisis that so profoundly affected San Francisco? A bow to the intense, outrageous performative past in this city? Or the Chicano grassroots arts that have animated Galeria de la Raza since its formation in the Mission in 1970?

Why are so many works by single artists — male artists who enjoy art-superstar reputations — hung as if animating visual encyclopedia entries, occupying one gallery upon the next upon the next? And whose idea was it to do it this way?

For the influential donors of the new SFMOMA, political art appears never to have been invented.

Designed by architecture firm Snøhetta under lead architect Craig Dykers, the facts of place have been widely reported: A cost of $305 million took the museum to seven floors, added 100,000 square feet of gallery space (galleries now total 170,000 square feet), and spells probable LEED Gold certification in the near future. Techie gee-gaws include mobile phone-in-pocket tours with voiceovers by comedians from the HBO show Silicon Valley, as well as by San Francisco Giants baseball players and a roller-derby player.

These whistles may signal the call at hand to attract new audiences for this museum, which was closed almost three years for its redo. In 2016, San Francisco’s population stood slightly above 800,000 (whites: 48%; Asians: a third), with a median age for both men and women of 38 years old— putting their birth year just a couple of years before the start of the AIDS crisis.

The enormous galleries, which Jason Farago in the Guardian called “joyless,” appear to have been built for a hanging of trophy multiples by Baselitz, Calder, Close, Kelly, Kentridge, Kiefer, Lichtenstein, Richter, Serra, Twombly and Warhol. Adjunct to that list are two women: Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell. I saw a Helen Frankenthaler and a couple of Sherrie Levines. (I admittedly did not see everything.) As to African-American contemporary artists, Glenn Ligon’s work was edged into a corner of the Campaign for Art floor, where Mark Bradford had slightly more breathing room. A press release of future solo exhibitions coming in the next year reveals Runa Islam as the sole woman among seven men.

Is a past commission for Sarah Sze or a future one for Julie Mehretu really adequate by way of representation? Even, in the Pritzker Center for Photography, the inclusion of a large Jim Goldberg body of 1970s work, Rich and Poor, doesn’t capture the embodied politics of San Francisco art.

The modern collection is indeed majestically impressive. Most spectacular to me were the Ellsworth Kelly rooms. In 1999, the Fishers, the Schwabs and Mimi and Peter Haas got together to purchase 19 paintings directly from Kelly; he also gave three of his early paintings to SFMOMA at that time. You can see the impact of this purchase-gift in the spectacular, Ellsworth Kelly Multi-Panel Paintings gallery that exhibits a grouping including Yellow Relief with Black (1993), Red on Red (2001), Black Triangle with White (1976), Red Curves (1996), and two 1968 paintings. Kelly’s death last December makes this tribute all the more moving.

Some might suggest that my quarrel is actually a quarrel with the pecuniary direction (listening, Stefan Simchowitz?) the art world has traveled. While finishing this post, I noticed that Art Market Monitor last year re-reported what it claimed had been a flawed record about the 1973 altercation between Bob Rauschenberg and art collector Robert Scull at a Sotheby’s Parke Bernet sale. The original tale goes that an aghast Rauschenberg socked Bob Scull in the stomach, angry about the prices at which Scull sold work that he had bought for a song. This latter-day version holds that the punch was actually a shove, after which the two men fell into an instant truce and “nervous laughter” as it dawned on Rauschenberg that new art’s inflationary trends would benefit him, too.

So if one can get past the issue of the donors wanting to demonstrate by example to a next-generation of contemporary collector, the larger issue is how fundamentally, all this emphasis on the trophies compresses the story of art. There’s not much new to say about Kiefer or Richter. Hey, rich collectors on the west coast buy the same names that rich New York collectors do. And they don’t much care if evictions and tech buses aren’t popular with young or old artists today.

The new architecture from the outside resembles a cruise ship lit from within, glittering trophies in its hold.

Snøhetta did away with most traces of Mario Botta’s earlier museum, consigning the former to just about the status of a ballroom floor, such that one wonders why the original museum was kept at all.

On the new entry floor, a Sol Lewitt mural of blue ground with white wavy squiggles is truncated in a way that turns it from art into a design element. And this too is notably important: San Francisco is a city with new star power in design. The 2016 National Design Awards honor San Francisco firms Ammunition in product design, and Studio O and A in interiors. Why do I need to learn about them in New York? Where are they? Where is new work by San Francisco interaction design firms? And who, in designing this museum, construed it wise to create curvy gray floor guards for underneath the Alexander Calder sculptures?

Fundamentally, though, here’s the beef. Frontloading the art experience as a collection of trophies strips out this fact. Art’s fundamental DNA is un-belonging, a character extending to rejection of systems.

You truly would not know that here.

San Francisco wanted, even needed, a world-class museum. The architecture is a tight, tall maze — with beautiful maple staircases. The gallery spaces re-propose the idea of scale as grandeur. But the grandeur of the Palace of the Louvre can’t be achieved anymore, even if what is posited on Howard Street is that new tech oligarchs sign up to be San Francisco’s future princes bestowing contemporary art pedigree on the city on the Bay.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/art/sfmoma-cruise-ship-makes-port-trophies-aboard/feed/2http://adobeairstream.com/art/sfmoma-cruise-ship-makes-port-trophies-aboard/New Topographics in Santa Fehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/u4QEYQMFd1o/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/new-topographics-santa-fe/#respondTue, 10 May 2016 18:24:41 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26700More ...]]>On Friday, January 29th, 2016, Caterpillar announced the closure of its Santa Fe factory. In a move to save money earlier this year, Cat also shuttered plants across the country, including laying off 230 people in my hometown of East Peoria, IL. Not surprisingly, the Caterpillar plant was the first building I noticed when my wife and I relocated to Santa Fe in August 2015. There was something calming about the familiar font and design of the Caterpillar sign hovering just below the mountains. My childhood landscape, far removed from the desert hues of Santa Fe, was a swirl of chain-link fences and the disassembled parts of excavators, dozers and wheel loaders, all awash in royal yellow and carbon black.

Soon after the plant announced its closing, I found myself driving out to the factory just to stare at its uninhabited beauty. Something nostalgic and purposeful resided in this artifice of decaying industry. The juxtaposition of an industrial past I spent the majority of my life escaping from against the sweeping vistas of New Mexico, a natural beauty I worked so hard to obtain. A stark image of my past and future stood silent and motionless in the spring, desert winds.

As I stood there snapping photos, I was trying to conjure my memories of childhood, an attempt to enliven a life spent in the shadow of union strikes and an artificially constructed environment of parking lots and windowless factories. As the setting sun painted the sky with lavender and mauve, the Caterpillar building blended into the landscape, to where the natural and artificial were no longer discernable in my mind. Something about this structure felt like nature to me, more natural than the geographic contours of Santa Fe, formed from volcanoes long since extinguished.

This line of thinking brought my thoughts into conversation with the environmental philosopher Steven Vogel and conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher. In his 2015 book, Thinking Like a Mall, Vogel argues against Aldo Leopold’s charge to think like a mountain, a meditation on where humans fit into nature. Rather, Vogel argues that humans should focus on the environment, the one we inhabit and the one we constructed, and jettison the false dichotomy between the artificial and the natural. One of my last research projects before leaving my position as a librarian at Denison University in Ohio, where Vogel teaches philosophy, was assisting him in tracking down images of and newspaper articles about the Columbus City Center, a mall torn down in 2009.

“The distinction between the natural and the artificial is ontologically meaningless: this is the central point I am trying to make… If the entire environment has become a built environment, would that not then mean that it was time to think about an environmentalism of the built environment?”

Vogel’s environmental philosophy of built environments has its ideological roots in “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” William Jenkins’s 1975 exhibit at the George Eastman House. This collection of images challenged our idealized images of nature and forced viewers to engage with the manufactured environment, devoid of humans. The only non-American photographers featured in the exhibit were a young German couple, the Bechers. Out of both a nostalgia for the industrial landscape of their childhood and an interest in documenting the beauty of structural patterns, they captured the abandoned structures dotting the countryside of post-World War II Germany.

In this series of photographs, I weave together my own images of the abandoned Caterpillar factory in Santa Fe with the words and thoughts of Steven Vogel and Hilla Becher, two individuals who also found beauty and nature in the world’s mills and malls.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/art/new-topographics-santa-fe/feed/0http://adobeairstream.com/art/new-topographics-santa-fe/Susan York at the O’Keeffe Museumhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/YyNfoBNf-lE/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/susan-york-okeeffe-museum/#respondTue, 10 May 2016 18:24:05 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26756More ...]]>Most of the time one doesn’t think of painting as volume, because a volume implies a third dimension. But on touring the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s winter show, Susan York: Carbon (January 21-April 17. 2016), it was easy to submit to a sense of pleasurable dislocation imparted when works of two dimension meet works of three, as in the meeting of O’Keeffe paintings and Susan York’s graphite sculptures. (Images are courtesy of the artist. Photographs: Larry Fodor.)

While being three-dimensional, York’s sculptures nevertheless make use of the wall — of the bearing walls of architecture — to juxtapose weight and impenetrability with conditions of lightness, even translucency, that the mind improbably reads into their black surface.

Art’s manifold geometries both on flat planes and tilting ones helped make the 20th-century a time of restless innovation and experiment. In this exhibit, one could review O’Keeffe’s determinism with the color black from as early as the watercolors she made of Palo Duro Canyon in West Texas (1916-1918), to Black Place paintings named for one of her favorite spots in the Abiquiu hills. It was also interesting to see O’Keeffe revisiting subjects later in life that she had first taken up five decades earlier: A black barn door at Lake George with a flagpole outside and a weathervane overhead. Black Manhattan skyscrapers leaning into a night sky pocked by stars. The door of the Abiquiu house as a black-on-beige study but for one green leaf stilled in its descent toward ground.

I was relieved in a way by this show. It revealed something about art’s nature as poetics, as representing formal — maybe the utmost of formal —negotiation with a measurement that in language might be called an iamb, a form-delimiting metric. Poets have always sung to readers in written text, hoping for the page to stir the blood. Artists contend with imposed conditions of flatness and dimensionality to stir our sentience — our sense of walking vertically upright and peering at the world shaping itself in front of us.

I have known Susan York for long enough to remember that she used to make porcelain shards that she then cautiously propped, lined up inside of metal brackets setting an endnote on a line that could at least conceptually prefigure infinity. The tension between that shard so thin, by definition brittle yet occupying a repose of object-hood, made the work interesting. It questioned ceramic as pottery fragment’s relation to urn. The root word might connote a container yet not prescribe one.

By 2007, York was experimenting with graphite— yes, the stuff of No. 2 pencils —in solo gallery shows.

Exhibitions 2D in Marfa, Texas made a gallery venue for York where the corner of the room functioned for her as it had for Kasimir Malevich, father of Suprematism, in his “desperate (1913) attempt” to free art from “the ballast of objectivity.” Hence these non-objective paintings secularized actually the spot that a Russian icon might have held — in a high corner where adjoining walls meet ceiling.

Malevich’s painted volumes on white ground— circles, cruciforms, squares — ticked along and still do,setting off those tremendously interesting conversations among artists and art historians who stood and stand agog at the implications of his mute, ineffably powerful action of visual declamation.

Malevich called Black Square the zero of painting, and Suprematism was correspondingly the “zero” of form.

Lannan Foundation in its mud-floored Santa Fe gallery in 2008 invited the artist to do a graphite sculpture install in the space. The most Space Odyssey piece hung from the ceiling (talk about a load-bearing bond beam). Visitors made their way around it a little bit like you see in pictures of people touching the Maya Lin Vietnam War memorial in Washington, DC.

York’s rubbing of graphite extended to her treatment of an Alcove show at the New Mexico Museum of Art. She rubbed and rubbed graphite on a wall surface until it shone lustrous.

Yet while for York, materials have taken her along a path leading to purer and purer abstraction, O’Keeffe of course did not herself continue to preference abstraction over representation in her burgeoning career. She turned to representational forms en route to becoming the godmother of desert aesthetics. In part that owed to the fact that from the 1920s and her arrival in New York, the merest curl of gesture evoked in critics’ analyses the curve of a breast, or another anatomical fold. (See this link about the impact of criticism on her work.).

York, who as a high-school student wrote a letter to O’Keeffe, has traced an arc of sorts between herself and minimalist sensei Agnes Martin. Getting to exhibit at the O’Keeffe Museum as a woman artist has been limited to a very select few who first fit into a Living Artists of Distinction category. Before that series was discontinued in 2012, the museum showed Anne Truitt, Sherrie Levine, Susan Rothenberg and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith under the LAoD moniker. Since 2013, solo shows for Annie Leibovitz, and now York, have conjugated O’Keeffe’s history with contemporary currency. Curator Cody Hartley observed that integrating Susan York’s installation into the O’Keeffe galleries marked a first for the museum in handling a show intended to spotlight “creative practice.”

The museum looked terrific and the graphite sculpture and drawing planked up against a wall with a slight air of insouciance made for truly a vivid dialogue.

Perhaps all that is to be said is that it is art’s promise to let you see things you feel you have mastered — in the sense of understanding — in a new way that is sometimes engendered by the relationship between “creative practices” adjoined.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/art/susan-york-okeeffe-museum/feed/0http://adobeairstream.com/art/susan-york-okeeffe-museum/How to View the Mexican Revolutionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/vCJavaK5teM/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/how-to-view-the-mexican-revolution/#respondMon, 09 Nov 2015 19:02:00 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26232More ...]]>In the photograph “Felicistas in the YMCA,” snipers crouch near a window in a rubble-strewn room and train their weapons on the street below, and yet, the title informs us, this violent scene takes place in a former community center.

The photograph appears in the exhibition Mexico at theHour of Combat: Sabino Osuna’s Photographs of the Mexican Revolution, on view at the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. It defies an otherwise chronological and thematic structure following the revolution and developments in Osuna’s photography. Located at the entrance of the exhibition, the image reveals a curatorial strategy to make the subject of the Mexican Revolution accessible for a US viewership. Some Americans may not recognize the names of revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata, but they know the YMCA, and likely experience the shock of seeing a familiar community center occupied by gunmen.

Mexico at the Hour of Combat shows, for the first time, a group of documentary photographs from UC Riverside Libraries Special Collections and Archives. This collection comprises 427 glass negatives of Sabino Osuna’s documentary photographs of the Mexican Revolution, 56 of which have been selected for inclusion in the exhibition. The show includes compelling portraits of key figures of the Revolution, as well as powerful documentation of the brutal violence of the war, and images constructed to craft a new Mexican identity.

As a whole, the exhibition importantly works to combat the under-representation of Mexican arts in U.S. cultural institutions, and seeks to draw attention to the Mexican Revolution as an important player in our understanding of revolution and resistance today. However, perhaps as interesting as the photographs themselves are the traces of the institutional presence of UC Riverside and of UNM within the exhibition.

Midway in the exhibition, a text panel explains curators Tyler Stallings and Ronald Chillcote’s decision to prioritize “Felicistas at the YMCA.” This text, titled “War Photography and the Osuna Collection,” contemplates the power of photography in shaping the cultural memory of historic events, and invokes Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima as an example. Further, the text expresses the hope that the exhibition of Osuna’s photographs will help carve a place in the collective imaginary for the Mexican Revolution. While the text does not directly refer to “Felicistas at the YMCA,” this photograph is clearly meant to become just such an iconic image as the text describes: It is the only image which appears on UC Riverside’s online announcement for the show, and it occupies the most prominent place in the exhibition.

The construction of this image as the iconic record of the Mexican Revolution reveals the particularly American perspective of the academic institutions involved in the exhibition. The Felicistas were a relatively minor and ineffective counterrevolutionary force, and thus, probably not the most important group to memorialize in history. And yet, rather than selecting an image of one of the major revolutionary leaders or an important event to promote as the iconic image of the revolution, the curators selected the image that would be most accessible to American viewers.

Despite the fact that academic institutions tend to foster a critical awareness of the entrenched power of the nation-state, the institutions themselves are enmeshed in those very structures of power and control. Archives, in particular, have a history of participating in the control of knowledge through the collection and systematic organization of information and materials collected from various cultures and nations, but available only to a privileged few.

The construction of the Felicistas photograph as the primary representation of the Mexican revolution is one example of this institutional presence in the exhibition. In addition, the exhibition promotes the university’s extensive scholarly resources concerning the Mexican Revolution, thus constructing the Revolution as an object of study more than a complex historical event with continuing significance. For example, one display promotes the David Craven papers as a valuable resource available to students at UNM.

The title of this section, “¡Viva la Revolución! The Legacy of the Mexican Revolution at UNM,” is particularly troubling. While it is admirable that primary source documentation of the revolution is available to UNM students, appropriating a revolutionary cry to describe the institutional collection of these materials conflates scholarly interest in the Mexican Revolution with political solidarity for the movement. Also, by promoting the university’s research materials, the exhibition serves to construct the Mexican Revolution primarily as an object of study, firmly situated in the past, and further, catalogued, categorized and accessible through the university’s extensive resources.

However, it is equally important to recognize that, at times, the exhibition does point to a more complex context for Osuna’s work, and shows the revolution to be a massive societal restructuring with important consequences. In particular, there is a small display designed by faculty from UNM’s department of Chicana and Chicano studies that promotes a realignment of perceptions of both the Mexican Revolution and current US-Mexico immigration policies. The accompanying text explains that the revolution was a productive rather than a destructive process. This collective effort instigated important developments for Mexican society, which was later undermined by US-influenced policy.

Similarly, several texts included within the exhibition itself argue that the Mexican Revolution continues to reverberate in the way we conceive of revolution and resistance in the collective imaginary, and has particular relevance for contemporary grassroots movements. This line of thinking is most notable in a display of contemporary items of culture that celebrate the revolution, as well as the accompanying text panel, which cites the revolution as an influence and source for those protesting the forced disappearance of 43 students from Guerrero.

Although traces of institutional control haunt this exhibition, it nevertheless encourages the contemplation of the oft-ignored revolution’s significance through Osuna’s striking images. And, while “Felicistas in the YMCA” may not be appropriate as the iconic image of the Mexican Revolution, other examples of Osuna’s work, such as “A People’s Army: Soldiers, Soldaderas, and their Children,” or “Giving water to a wounded man,” would certainly be excellent contenders.

]]>http://adobeairstream.com/art/how-to-view-the-mexican-revolution/feed/0http://adobeairstream.com/art/how-to-view-the-mexican-revolution/Nick Cave on Practice, Performance and Violencehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adobeairstream/uXHB/~3/-eHGkbVbwyU/
http://adobeairstream.com/art/nick-cave-on-practice-performance-and-violence/#respondMon, 09 Nov 2015 19:01:28 +0000http://adobeairstream.com/?p=26272More ...]]>Twigs are unassuming, irregular, trodden-upon nuisances to be swept up with the leaves in the fall. However, in Nick Cave’s Soundsuit (1991), the humble twig, collected and assembled into a garment, becomes deeply powerful. Soundsuit’s texture seems both shaggy and rigid; its form is ponderous and dynamic, strange and familiar. Further, the imposing anthropomorphic structure also serves as regalia for Cave’s performances, which animate his artworks with dance and music. Although these performances are celebratory, the soundsuits, for there are many, also critique social injustices, existential explorations of self in relation to society, and the power of collective experience.

During an October 13 conversation with Cave at the University of New Mexico’s Rodey Theatre, Kymberly Pinder said that Cave’s twig soundsuit helped her conceive of the exhibition Necessary Force: Art in the Police State, which she co-curated with Karen Fiss at the UNM Art Museum. Cave said the original impulse to create the twig suit evolved out of the artist’s heightened awareness of what it meant to be a black man in the United States following the Rodney King beating in 1991. The brutal police violence against King, along with Cave’s own experience of being a black student at the mostly white Cranbrook Academy of Art, motivated him to shift the course of his artistic practice.

At the talk, Cave recounted the experience of sitting in a park and noticing an insignificant twig on the ground. The twigs had been cast-off and rejected but by gathering and assembling hundreds of them, he transformed the individual twig’s status and power. This gathering mimics the power of collective action in response to social injustices. While Cave’s exploration of materials has proliferated, his subsequent works all seem to retain the same initial impulse as that first twig assemblage: Their playfulness creates a dreamspace, a temporary separation from reality, while their questioning of the individual’s role in society draws attention to its unequal structure.

In addition to a discussion of Cave’s artistic practice and methods, the conversation at Rodey Theatre also included a screening of a collaborative video project for the recent exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Here Hear. This mini-documentary followed Cave and a team of collaborators as they scouted urban sites for performances in Detroit, set up shots, and costumed one another in the soundsuits. While Cave’s work often manifests in the form of performances, this case was different; the documentary recorded not only the performance, but also the collaborative process behind it. Cave’s team actively participates in the creative process. The visually diverse nature of the locations also create a sense of inclusivity not always apparent when the soundsuits show in galleries and museums.

In vernacular, urban spaces such as warehouses or near graffiti-decked bridges, Cave’s soundsuits interrupt the traditional canon of art history. The materiality of his work acknowledges a wide range of traditions, including West African and Native American influences, Mardi Gras Indians, and domestic arts traditionally gendered as female. All of these contexts have historically been classified as popular, low-art forms and systematically disallowed from the Western world of museums and galleries. Cave’s use of such decorative and primitive forms thus disrupts the hierarchy of art history and high culture. Although the soundsuits are now incorporated in the contemporary art world, they continue to acknowledge forms and traditions outside the realm of Eurocentric, Western art practices.

Cave conceived of his recent work in Detroit as invasions or interventions: opportunities to forge contact with community leaders, and embark on collaborations. For the projects HeardDetroit, and Up Right: Detroit, Cave worked with local young people, who performed as dancers and helped design the movements for performances. Pinder asked Cave to explain the reciprocity of his relationship with the student volunteers, asking what he leaves with them. A soundsuit? An artwork? Cave said that he leaves students with an “imprint”: the opportunity for students to collaborate in the artistic process, carry out a significant project, and learn to move in the soundsuits as a confidence-building, impactful experience.

A video by Detroit-based production company The Right Brothers, documents one such collaboration between Cave and the 60 dancers from the Detroit School of Arts and Wayne State University who participated in the HeardDetroit performance. The artist not only instructs the students in what kind of movements to produce, but also attempts to bring them into his mode of thinking, making clear the power and importance of the performance. HeardDetroit successfully draws attention to liminal spaces and identities.

The performance’s siting in Detroit reshapes understandings of a city that has been marginalized and disregarded on a national level. Subverting conceptions of a tired, post-capital Detroit, this performance creates a space for both performers and viewers to gather in a civic celebration. In addition to eliding class, race, and gender (as all of Cave’s soundsuits do), the horse forms he uses in this performance even allow the dancers to transcend the particular associations of the human body by creating a part animal- part human identity outside the limits of the rational.

Equally powerful is Cave’s use of a marching band, horses, and costumed human figures that reference the notion of military tactics and a struggle, perhaps against societal oppression, with strong, coordinated movements on a large field. Like Cave’s twig soundsuit, this performance inhabits the space where individual identity and society overlap, contemplating social injustice and the potential for change as well as the meaning of each dancer’s relationship with the dynamic soundsuit and each audience member’s experience of the performance.

Cave emphasized that the performances really rely on the dancers’ groundedness. The soundsuits can be overwhelming, so before a performer dons one, she must sit quietly with it, look at it, perhaps touch it, and prepare herself to work with the energy inherent in the suit itself. After all, the suits carry with them an entire cosmology: Each one refers back to Cave’s initial impulse to make the twig suit, to global associations with ritual and performance, and longstanding traditions of ornamentation and fiber arts.

It’s a lot for an individual dancer to carry. And, yet, perhaps the urge to costume ourselves in a way that armors the body while also carving a space for our own voices and locating ourselves within a larger social context is not so unusual. During the conversation with Cave, Kimberly Pynder’s cell phone buzzed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my daughter. She’s trying to work on her Halloween costume, and I’m supposed to be helping. She wants to be a spooky tree. Actually, maybe you can help with that, Nick.”